Preface

Near the end of 2016, I was brainstorming with my editor about the kinds of books might be of interest. I had been doing a series of articles on my blog called PyDev of the Week that inspired us into crafting a book based on interviewing core members of the Python community. I spent some time hashing out 20 names of people that I thought would be good for the book and then I started contacting them in 2017.

Over the course of about 8-12 months, I ended up interviewing 20 pillars of the Python community, although my list changed several times over that period. Some people weren't available or couldn't be reached. But I persevered and managed to pull together a well-rounded set of representatives of the Python programming community.

In this book, you will get interesting anecdotes about the history of Python and its creators, such as Brett Cannon and Nick Coghlan. You will discover why Python didn't have Unicode support in its first release, and you'll hear from core developers about where they think Python is going in the future. You will also hear from some well-known Python authors, like Al Sweigart, Luciano Ramalho, and Doug Hellman.

I also spoke with some of the creators or core developers of popular third-party packages in Python, such as web2py (Massimo Di Pierro), SQLAlchemy (Mike Bayer), and the Twisted Framework (Glyph Lefkowitz), among others.

My interview with Carol Willing was a lot of fun. She is also a core developer of the Python language itself, so learning her views on women in technology and Python was quite enlightening. She is also a contributor to Project Jupyter, so learning more about that project was exciting.

I think you will find Alex Martelli and Steve Holden's interviews to be especially compelling as they have been working with Python for a very long time and have many interesting insights.

There is a lot to learn from all the individuals that I spoke with. If you happen to know them, you know that even better than I do. All of them were great to chat with and very responsive to me even on the shortest of timelines. If you happen to meet them at a conference, be sure to thank them for their contributions.

Special thanks go out to all the people I interviewed. They took time out of their lives to help me with this project and I truly appreciate it. I also want to thank my editors for keeping this project on track. Finally, I would like to thank my wife, Evangeline, for putting up with me interviewing people at random times throughout the summer. And finally, I want to thank you, dear reader, for checking out this book.